Pro Tip: Don’t Lie on Your M.B.A. Application

Business schools have beefed up their screening processes to ensure admitted students are emotionally intelligent and job-ready. But they still don’t always screen candidates for things like criminal backgrounds or expulsion from a prior institution, or even the veracity of claims made about work experience.

That might explain how Mathew Martoma, currently on trial for alleged insider trading at SAC Capital, gained admission to Stanford Graduate School of Business shortly after being expelled from Harvard Law School for falsifying his transcript in an attempt to land a judicial clerkship. (Martoma has pleaded not guilty to the charges of insider trading.)

Martoma graduated from Stanford in 2003 and joined SAC in 2006.

“Expulsion from another institution due to fraud, if it were disclosed or known, would create a serious impediment to admission,” says Derrick Bolton, assistant dean for M.B.A. admissions there.

Stanford instituted rigorous background checks within the past decade, under Bolton and after Martoma was admitted, and now all students who are accepted go through some series of verification tests such as confirmation of their employment, education and even anecdotes from essays.

In a typical year, the school rescinds offers to between one and three students out of a class of around 400 based in part on these tests. (Stanford receives upwards of 7,000 applications each year, and so narrows the pool before digging in.)

Stanford has worked with investigation firms Kroll Inc. and Re Vera Services LLC, and conducts in-house investigations to confirm elements of applications, but Bolton says it’s the things that don’t make it onto the application in the first place that are the hardest to deal with.

Last year, two candidates omitted details about prior graduate school studies. They both graduated from their institutions with strong marks, Bolton says, but claimed to have been working or otherwise occupied during that time. “There was no issue had it been disclosed. The issue was the deception,” he says. Their acceptance offers were rescinded.

Some schools still do have remarkably laissez faire attitudes toward applicant screening, asking candidates to expose past indiscretions and even sign an honor code, but doing little to confirm they’ve told the truth.

Insead, with campuses in France, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, has no official policy for vetting applicants but readers might occasionally Google a candidate or check that a reference letter was authentic, says Caroline Diarte Edwards, who was admissions director there until April 2012 and now works as an admissions consultant at Fortuna Admissions. And generally, “If we had any concerns or question marks, we would investigate further with the candidate him or herself.”

Pejay Belland, Insead’s director of marketing and financial aid for degree programs, says that the school “doesn’t vet every element of the application systematically,” but does perform spot checks when “there appear to be discrepancies.” The schools plans to roll out more screening steps in the coming months, shesaid.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Columbia Business School, which also works with Re Vera. Every student who ultimately enrolls has gone through the comprehensive vetting process, according to Michael Malone, associate dean for M.B.A. programs.

Columbia has come across inconsistencies on occasion, putting an applicant’s candidacy “at least in jeopardy” and often leading to outright rejection, he says.

Meanwhile, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School contracted with ADP Screening & Selection Services in 2002 to vet applications.

“We were concerned with the degree of exaggeration—and perhaps even outright lies—in applications,” former admissions director Rose Martinelli told BusinessWeek in a September 2002 Q&A. “We’re hoping never to catch anyone.”

Wharton expelled an M.B.A. student in March 2002 after discovering the student provided misleading information and a forgery in an application.

Wharton representatives declined to comment on the school’s current processes, other than to say that they’re similar to those at peer institutions.

New York University’s Stern School of Business stepped up vetting for its executive M.B.A. a few years ago, checking that all doctors who applied were in good standing within the medical community. That practice of checking licenses was put in place after the school saw a candidate with a stellar application but some elements that looked “off,” recalls Dina Glasofer, senior associate director of admissions at Stern from 2007 to 2011 who now works at Fortuna. After a cursory Google search, her office learned the applicant had “a pretty scandalous past,” including having his medical license revoked.

A Stern representative said the school has had a question about professional licenses in its application “for many years,” and independently verifies certain data.

Applying to business school is “stressful and high stakes,” Stanford’s Bolton says. “When you put those things together, sometimes you get behaviors that are not ideal.”

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